Monica’s 3 Movies to Stream or Rent This Weekend

Watching is The New York Times’s TV and film recommendation newsletter and website.

Looking to avoid the crowds at movie theaters this holiday weekend? I have three movies for you, each available to rent or stream on a major platform. If you can’t get to them this weekend, save them to your Watchlist, and check them out when you have time.

Bong Joon Ho’s latest movie manages to be heartwarming while also satirizing corporate culture, animal rights activists and the meat industry. “Okja” is the story of a South Korean girl (An Seo Hyun); her giant, genetically modified pet pig, Okja; and the crooked agribusiness corporation headed by Lucy Mirando (a girlish Tilda Swinton) that wants its property back.

Like many of Bong’s previous movies (“Snowpiercer,” “The Host”), “Okja” commingles humor and tragedy. An is wonderful as the girl determined to save her pig, and the rest of the film features strange and campy performances from Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal and Paul Dano.—

Mark Cousins does not promise a complete look at the history of children in the movies, but his expansive documentary does include films — and kids — from around the world. Using his niece and nephew’s playtime as a starting point, Cousins peers through various cultural and historical lenses to trace the similarities and differences between childhood play and the way filmmakers tell stories from a child’s point of view. Film buffs who enjoyed his sprawling 15-hour series “The Story of Film: An Odyssey” (which is streaming on Hulu) will appreciate the obscure movie references in “A Story of Children and Film.” (Those with limited time need not fear — this one runs under two hours.)

Join a group of Iranian engineers as they set off to document a quiet old town in this Abbas Kiarostami film from 2000. “The Wind Will Carry Us” is slow, a lesson to listen and live in the moment. It’s a lesson the main character, one of the engineers, learns while waiting for something to happen, when he should simply be soaking up the rolling golden hills and the weathered houses that make up the town. —